How can we ensure that "good-subjective" questions have a place in chess.se?

Question

There is a wonderful page in the Stackoverflow blog which illustrates the spectrum from objective to subjective questions, and notes that the expertise we want to capture usually falls between those extremes.

There are bad questions which need to be closed immediately, but too often good subjective questions in chess.se are closed on the grounds that they are "opinion-based" because "this is not a discussion site".

I think this is a distortion of the principles of stackexchange, and chess.se is greatly impoverished as a result of the current policy. Chess skill is not about objective tablebases, it is about experience & judgement. As the diagram on the Stackoverflow page shows, expertise lies between objective & subjective knowledge.

In moderator posts in chess.se, I see "experience, judgement & expertise" diminished as "opinion", and if it's merely opinion, well of course we can close it off. This is frankly awful, yet it happens many times.

Today's example is Please comment on my book idea, this is basically some trying to sanity-check the scope of a book he plans to write (and yes let me add before someone else does, he is also possibly trying to get a tiny amount of publicity). That seems a worthwhile thing to do. It may be that the question could be rephrased to give more focus, but if that's the case, then the question-closer can provide an example of this focus, rather than requiring the questioner to guess.

There are 6 questions given on the Stackoverflow page as to whether a subjective question is good. I think this question passes all 6 comfortably.

I am grateful for the thankless work of the moderators, but we need to recognize a process problem. It is the act of a moment for 1 moderator to unilaterally close a page, currently with no real effort or reaching out to the questioner to indicate how the question should be fixed. I'm not particularly getting at any moderator but it's a known bug in the process that the moderator cannot just "vote" for closing. The moderator can only close unilaterally, which puts them in an invidious position. Once closed, it takes the concerted action of 5 individuals to reopen a page: it is so inefficient.

How can we fix this broken process? At the very least, I would like before closure of a possibly good-subjective question for the moderator to provide a warning comment containing the scope of needed repairs. That gives the questioner a chance to understand what's going on, and spares other members the large process effort required to re-open the question later.

I want to see moderators using words like "judgement" & "experience". Right now, all I see is the pejorative distorting term "opinion". Until I see these other terms appear in moderator assessment, I have to suspect that sadly there is maybe also a problem of attitude. Attitude cannot be fixed by just process. I would request that some be kinder and more open to good subjective questions, as prevails in the rest of stackexchange. Chess.se will be the richer for this.

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

This question has recently been closed as opinion-based when it's clearly not. It's easy to see when we rephrase the question as "What are some common reasons people accept long online games and then...?", which feels different but is asking for the same thing. It's possible to give a subjective opinion on the topic, and in fact there's probably no objectively correct answer as no research has been done on the topic. Still, the question itself isn't opinion-based. We may only know opinion-based answers so far, but the same applies to questions like "What's the optimal training program for someone in X circumstances?". I still think the question is low-quality and deserves to be closed, but it being opinion-based isn't the reason.

Similarly, one may argue that this question is also opinion-based given how the answers all point out to different positional factors. Since we can't do a deep enough analysis of the position, we could also argue that no definitive objective answer is possible and the question doesn't belong. But of course nobody on their right mind would!

As a third example, we have this one from a newcomer which got closed and then reopened (I wouldn't be surprised if the user isn't coming back after the first closure!). This is a totally legitimate non-subjective question that allows for answers based around objective observations. A question like "Would it be better to use A rather than B?" can be seen as subjective, but "What are the reasons people use A rather than B?" or "What are the respective pros and cons of A and B?" clearly isn't. Even though we may disagree that A is better than B, we can still acknowledge the reasons why people choose A in an objective manner.

I'm quite frustrated with this type of situation where someone asks a perfectly legit question and it gets closed by someone who didn't even understand it (see comments on the third example). I agree with you that we should be more lenient. But the main issue is that if 1,000 people are fine with the question and 5 aren't, it will still be closed (and then perhaps reopened), since we can't cast re-open votes on questions that aren't closed yet. Would it be possible to introduce a system like counting every upvote as a "pre-emptive reopen vote"? For instance, if it normally takes 3 votes to close but the question has 2 upvotes, then it takes 5 for that specific question. This should be done regardless of downvotes as the people who voted for closing have probably downvoted too.